A Study Of Grammatical Metaphor In Business English Contract Discourse

According to the theory of Halliday and other scholars in the systemic-functional school, ideational grammatical metaphor is usually related with scientific and formal writing as it renders a sense of objectivity and authority. The thesis applies Halliday's systematic functional linguistic theory to the study of ideational grammatical metaphor in business English contract discourse so as to explore the characteristics of business English contract language and reveal the functions of ideational grammatical metaphor in the discourse.The study begins with tagging and establishing the business English contract corpus. 20 business English contracts are selected for setting up the corpus. The searching function of MicroConcord is used and the commands to its macros are made so as to find and do statistics of the marks used to tag all the contracts.Applying the descriptive method with qualitative and quantitative study to thorough analyses of ideational grammatical metaphor in business English contract discourse on the basis of Halliday's systemic functional linguistics theory, statistical analyses on occurrence and frequency of the phenomena of ideational grammatical metaphor in business English contract discourse are made. Four groups of ideational grammatical metaphors are analyzed respectively and nominalization is put more emphasis on because it is the main form of ideational grammatical metaphor.Examining the four groups of ideational grammatical metaphors in business English contract discourse, it is found that downgrading occurs in every group: nominalization causes downgrading from the figure to the element; prepositionalization causes downgrading from the sequence to the figure; adjectivation causes downgrading from the figure to the element and downgrading from the sequence to the figure; verbalization causes downgrading from the sequence to the figure. As the variation of the expression, ideational grammatical metaphor generates new grammatical structures which mainly involve the downgrading from the higher semantic level to the lower one. The results of downgrading are"information-packed"and"meaning-reconstrued". It is concluded that business English contract discourse finds abundant use of ideational grammatical metaphor. Ideational grammatical metaphor redounds to the objectivity of the discourse; it also highlights the frozen style and the five Cs—completeness, concreteness, clearness, conciseness and correctness—of business English contract discourse.